[TheForge] Wooden Hammer Handles

[Peter Fels & Phoebe Palmer]

I was and am impressed with him..pf

ries wrote:
> That Rick is a sneaky little feller- he's stronger than he looks.
> He has to be, to keep up with his students- He runs the only graduate  
> level blacksmithing course in the USA, about 7 of em right now  
> (students, that is) along with another60 to 80 undergrads.
> I spent a weekend with em this fall, and them kids who want to be  
> blacksmiths bad enough to pay big bucks to study it at a major  
> university- they are a wild, tattooed, pierced, hard drinking, heavy  
> hammer swinging bunch. And thats just the girls.
> The boys,  well, look out.
> And Rick keeps up with, in fact, usually surpasses em, in just about  
> every category. Although I didnt see him riding a hand forged  
> motorcycle, although I wouldnt put it past him.
> He was up later, and then up earlier, than any of those 20 somethings,  
> and liquid consumption on his part seemed to run equal as well.
> 
> Ries
> 
> 
> On Jan 8, 2009, at 10:56 PM, Peter Fels & Phoebe Palmer wrote:
> 
> At a CBA demo years ago, Rick Smith drew out a billet of fancy pattern
> welded steel in one or 2 heats using a big hammer ( 6-7#s? or more). He
> struck so many hard blows for such a sustained period that the
> spectators started rubbing their arms and shoulders unconsciously.
> He was not a real big fellow and i was amazed.
> It looked like  he didn't begin lifting the handle at the moment of
> impact like i usually do, but rather, waited while the rebound rotated
> the handle to a nearly  vertical orientation. So when he began his lift
> the hammer head was oddly  close to his chest, balanced atop the handle.
> Then he shoved it straight up as high as he could reach on his tip toes
> before jerking it back down to start the down stroke. Almost seemed like
> he was hanging from the handle at the apex.
> He moved a very impressive mass of steel...
> 
> No Jerry, it wasn't Handel's 4th movement...he did that in private..pf
> 
> Mike Spencer wrote:
>> "David Childress" <trollkeep at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> My first blacksmithing instructor claimed that handles should not
>>> matter.  If the hammer head was below your shoulder you should just  
>>> be
>>> guiding it.
>> That's interesting.
>>
>> I had a very clear notion of just what my hammer and I were doing
>> during a blow and even wrote up a description for someone once.  I was
>> really quite sure that I had an excellent intuitive grasp of what has
>> happening.
>>
>> Then I got a chance to shoot some high-speed images of hammering and
>> discovered that I was completely wrong.  See:
>>
>>   http://home.tallships.ca/mspencer/hammer.html
>>
>> and in particular:
>>
>>   http://home.tallships.ca/mspencer/vec.html
>>
>> where measurement taken from the images indicate that the hammer head
>> is still accelerating below shoulder height.  Those images were made
>> at a time when I was regularly doing a lot of hammering and was as
>> much in "top form" as I have ever been.
>>
>>> when the head hits the only force should be from the
>>> change of direction.
>> Allowing a large margin of error for possibly sloppy measurements, the
>> vector diagram suggests that's true only near the very end of the
>> hammer's flight path.
>>
>> I've never been strong enough to work for very long with a 5# hammer
>> unless I use it very differently from the way I swing my favored
>> 2-1/2# hammer.  At a demo, I was once dared to prove I could do a nice
>> upset right-angle bend with properly radiused inside and sharp
>> outside, in 1/2" x 2" and accurately positioned at a predetermined
>> place.  I did it easily in one heat with a 5# hammer but I couldn't
>> keep that up for very many heats.
>>
>>> He believed in heavy hammers and gravity, your strength should be in
>>> lifting the thing up to drop it again.
>> There was a blacksmith in Lunenburg, NS, an elderly guy when I met him
>> circa 1970, who did essentially that.  He used what I took to be a 5#
>> or possibly even heavier (diagonal-peen on one face) hammer with a
>> very short handle [1].  He raised the hammer to about shoulder height
>> directly over the anvil and brought it down more or less in a straight
>> line onto the workpiece, more pushing it or dropping it than swinging
>> it.  I thought it an odd and counterproductive style but he was an old
>> guy, had been doing it all his life and was still getting orders for
>> knives by the dozen.
>>
>> Another aspect was that he was forging filleting knife blades --
>> rather broad and thin -- for the guys at the fish plant, for which he
>> may have figured out a particular style that worked for him, the
>> particular material and the product.  I never saw him forge anything
>> else as he passed away before I got around to paying him another
>> visit.  He might have done quite differently forging, say, graplin
>> flukes or ring bolts.
>>
>> FWIW,
>> - Mike
>>
>>
>> [1] Or, for Frosty's benefit, haft or helve.  But only scythes have
>>    snaths and nibs, okay Frosty? :-)
>>
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> 
> Ries Niemi
> Industrial Artist
> http://www.riesniemi.com/
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